A Graveyard for Lunatics

“At the end of a week I hand in both. You get to choose which is right.”

Manny eyed me suspiciously, still half in, half out of the Rolls.

“Crap! You’ll do your best work on your idea!”

“No. I’ll do my damnedest for you. But also my damnedest for me. Shake?”

“Two Monsters for the price of one? Do it! C’mon!”

Outside the door Roy stopped dramatically. “You ready for this? Prepare your minds and souls.” He held up both beautiful artists’ hands, like a priest.

“I’m prepared, dammit. Open!”

Roy flung open the outside and then the inside door and we stepped into total darkness.

“Lights, dammit!” said Manny.

“Hold on—” whispered Roy.

We heard Roy move in the dark, stepping carefully over unseen objects.

Manny twitched nervously.

“Almost ready,” intoned Roy across a night territory. “Now…”

Roy turned on a wind machine, low. First there was a whisper like a giant storm, which brought with it weather from the Andes, snow murmuring off the shelves of the Himalayas, rain over Sumatra, a jungle wind headed for Kilimanjaro, the rustle of skirts of tide along the Azores, a cry of primitive birds, a flourish of bat wings, all blended to lift your gooseflesh and drop your mind down trapdoors toward—

“Light!” cried Roy.

And now the light was rising on Roy Holdstrom’s landscapes, on vistas so alien and beautiful it broke your heart and mended your terror and then shook you again as shadows in great lemming mobs rushed over the microscopic dunes, tiny hills, and miniature mountains, fleeing a doom already promised but not yet arrived.

I looked around with delight. Roy had read my mind again. The bright and dark stuff I threw on the midnight screens inside my camera obscura head he had stolen and blueprinted and built even before I had let them free with my mouth. Now, turnabout, I would use his miniature realities to flesh out my most peculiar odd script. My hero could hardly wait to sprint through this tiny land.

Manny Leiber stared, flabbergasted.

Roy’s dinosaur land was a country of phantoms revealed in an ancient and artificial dawn.

Enclosing this lost world were huge glass plates on which Roy had painted primordial junglescapes, tar swamps in which his creatures sank beneath skies as fiery and bitter as Martian sunsets, burning with a thousand shades of red.

I felt the same thrill I had felt when, in high school, Roy had taken me home and I had gasped as he swung his garage doors wide on, not automobiles, but creatures driven by ancient needs to rise, claw, chew, fly, shriek, and die through all our childhood nights.

And here, now, on Stage 13, Roy’s face burned above a whole miniature continent that Manny and I were stranded on.

I tiptoed across it, fearful of destroying any tiny thing. I reached a single covered sculpture platform and waited.

Surely this must be his greatest beast, the thing he had set himself to rear when, in our twenties, we had visited the primal corridors of our local natural history museum. Surely somewhere in the world this Beast had hidden in dusts, treading char, lost in God’s coal mines under our very tread! Hear! oh hear that subway sound, his primitive heart, and volcanic lungs shrieking to be set free! And had Roy set him free?

“I’ll be goddamned.” Manny Leiber leaned toward the hidden monster. “Do we see it now?”

“Yes,” Roy said, “that’s it.”

Manny touched the cover.

“Wait,” said Roy. “I need one more day.”

“Liar!” said Manny. “I don’t believe you got one goddamn bastard thing under that rag!”

Manny took two steps. Roy jumped three.

At which instant, the Stage 13 set phone rang.

Before I could move, Manny grabbed it.

“Well?” he cried.

His face changed. Perhaps it got pale, perhaps not, but it changed.

“I know that.” He took a breath. “I know that, too.” Another breath; his face was getting red now. “I knew that half an hour ago! Say, god damn it to hell, who is this!?”

A wasp buzzed at the far end of the line. The phone had been hung up.

“Son of a bitch!”

Manny hurled the phone and I caught it.

“Wrap me in a wet sheet, someone, this is a madhouse! Where was I? You!”

He pointed at both of us.

“Two days, not three. You damn well get the Beast out of the catbox and into the light or—”

At which point the outer door opened. A runt of a guy in a black suit, one of the studio chauffeurs, stood in a glare of light.

“Now what?” Manny shouted.

“We got it here but the motor died. We just got it fixed.”

“Move out, then, for Christ’s sake!”

Manny charged at him with one fist raised, but the door slammed, the runt was gone, so Manny had to turn and direct his explosion at us.

“I’m having your final checks made up, ready for Friday afternoon. Deliver, or you’ll never work again, either of you.”

Roy said quietly, “Do we get to keep it? Our Green Town, Illinois, offices? Now that you see these results you got from us fruitcakes?”

Manny paused long enough to look back at the strange lost country like a kid in a fireworks factory.

“Christ,” he breathed, forgetting his problems for a moment, “I got to admit you really did it.” He stopped, angry at his own praise, and shifted gears. “Now cut the cackle and move your buns!”

And—bam! He was gone, too.

Standing in the midst of our ancient landscape, lost in time, Roy and I stared at one another.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Roy. Then, “You really going to do it? Write two versions of the script? One for him, one for us?”

“Yep! Sure.”

“How can you do that?”

“Heck,” I said, “I been in training for fifteen years, wrote one hundred pulp stories, one a week, in one hundred weeks, two script outlines in two days? Both brilliant? Trust me.”

“Okay, I do, I do.” There was a long pause, then he said, “Do we go look?”

“Look? At what?”

“That funeral you saw. In the rain. Last night. Over the wall. Wait.”

Roy walked over to the big airlock door. I followed. He opened the door. We looked out.

An ornately carved black hearse with crystal windows was just pulling away down the studio alley, making a big racket with a bad engine.

“I bet I know where it’s going,” said Roy.

8

We drove around on Gower Street in Roy’s old beat-up 1927 tin lizzie.

We didn’t see the black funeral hearse go into the graveyard, but as we pulled up out front and parked, the hearse came rolling out among the stones.

It passed us, carrying a casket into the full sunlight of the street.

We turned to watch the black limousine whisper out the gate with no more sound than a polar exhalation from off the northern floes.

“That’s the first time I ever saw a casket in a funeral car go out of a cemetery. We’re too late!”

I spun about to see the last of the limo heading east, back toward the studio.

“Too late for what?”

“Your dead man, dummy! Come on!”

We were almost to the cemetery back wall when Roy stopped.

“Well, by God, there’s his tomb.”

I looked at what Roy was looking at, about ten feet above us, in marble:

J. C. ARBUTHNOT, 1884-1934 R.I.P.

It was one of those Greek-temple huts in which they bury fabulous people, with an iron lattice gate locked over a heavy wood-and-bronze inner door.

“He couldn’t have come out of there, could he?”

“No, but something got on that ladder and I knew his face. And someone else knew I would recognize that face so I was invited to come see.”

“Shut up. Come on.”